Once I've finished Ride Across Britain I'd like a bit more than sore muscles to show for it. Quite aside from being slightly damaged in the head department, I'm also a card-carrying geek, so it's to be expected that I shall be logging and blogging the trip.
My original plan was to take a netbook with me, and spend a bit of R&R time in the evening getting everything checked in, however we've been advised that laptops are a bad idea (the luggage service is going to be bags in trucks, so in all probability delicate electronics will be bashed to death). On top of that we can expect only limited 3G coverage, especially in more northern realms of the country.
As such I've had to start re-working my e-geek strategy. In the absence of a laptop my next communication tool is my Nokia 5800, a fairly basic and robust smartphone. I tend to pick phones that are suitable for beating people to death, and still capable of working afterwards. I can use this to upload to various services and sites via Pixelpipe. I'll use Twitter as my main target, and build a small micro-site based around a twitter feed to a specific tag (something along the lines of #rab10pg), and this can include video, piccies and updates.
Of course, I need some way of capturing the media. I'll have my compact camera, however that will only be really useful at static locations (base camps, pit stops etc). For photos while cycling I don't really want to risk getting a camera out...in pack cycling thats just asking for it. I've been hunting round for a bullet camera, however I've struggled to find one that isn't either stupidly expensive (normally with a remote storage/power supply, or too heavy), or simply rubbish. I also wanted it to be able to take stills and video.
I finally settled on a Swann MDV 450. It's 60 grams, can do video and stills, is robust, and most importantly saves to Micro SD card, which I can put in the Nokia to upload. It also uses the same charger as my Garmin (unfortunately without a PC I don't think I can get stuff off that, as it's integrated memory).
I'll be testing the camera over the next few days, and then spend an evening whipping up a RSS feed page. While it would be handy to have the netbook, without it I get a couple more kilos of other stuff to take with me (weight limit of 15kg's in total)...probably in food form!
Showing posts with label technical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technical. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Friday, 1 May 2009
Time-lapsing...for fun and profit?
Well, maybe not profit.
I've just posted up a timelapse video of teh car jouney back from the Gower peninsula to Reading, and I'd thought I should back it up with a few notes on the steps I had to go through in order to make it...
The filming equipment was;
The netbook was running the Creative software (Live! Cam Centre) for the webcam, which has a function called "Remote Monitoring", which can be set to take an image capture every x seconds and save it to the hard-drive (and if you are particularly eager, upload it to a website as well). For this video the time was every second, however due to the performance limitations of the netbook it slowly dropped to about 1 image every 4 seconds.
The webcam was attached to the sun-visor in the passenger seat, and the output image flipped/inverted as required in the driver settings (the camera was technically upside down). I took the biggest possible image size (1280x1024) and disabled automatic exposure control (which had trouble when facing towards the sun). The netbook was plugged into the inverter (the previous attempt to do the video on the way there had shown that the battery life was not enough to record the entire journey). In total 5337 images were taken over the course of 3 hours.
The images were all renamed into a numerically sequential order using the "batch rename" functionality of ACDSee, and then fed into VirtualDub as an image feed. VirtualDub can save sequentially named images as a video file. As part of doing this, I also applied a Crop filter to the output file to reduce the image size from 1280x1024 to 1280x720 (YouTubes preferred HD file format).
Once that was done I had the main video file, and I just needed to top and tail it in my preferred video editing software. Add an MP3 (took a few minutes to find one that was both long enough and vaguely relevant to the subject matter), and then encode it using a Divx 5 HD profile and upload it to YouTube...
Simples...
I've just posted up a timelapse video of teh car jouney back from the Gower peninsula to Reading, and I'd thought I should back it up with a few notes on the steps I had to go through in order to make it...
The filming equipment was;
The netbook was running the Creative software (Live! Cam Centre) for the webcam, which has a function called "Remote Monitoring", which can be set to take an image capture every x seconds and save it to the hard-drive (and if you are particularly eager, upload it to a website as well). For this video the time was every second, however due to the performance limitations of the netbook it slowly dropped to about 1 image every 4 seconds.
The webcam was attached to the sun-visor in the passenger seat, and the output image flipped/inverted as required in the driver settings (the camera was technically upside down). I took the biggest possible image size (1280x1024) and disabled automatic exposure control (which had trouble when facing towards the sun). The netbook was plugged into the inverter (the previous attempt to do the video on the way there had shown that the battery life was not enough to record the entire journey). In total 5337 images were taken over the course of 3 hours.
The images were all renamed into a numerically sequential order using the "batch rename" functionality of ACDSee, and then fed into VirtualDub as an image feed. VirtualDub can save sequentially named images as a video file. As part of doing this, I also applied a Crop filter to the output file to reduce the image size from 1280x1024 to 1280x720 (YouTubes preferred HD file format).
Once that was done I had the main video file, and I just needed to top and tail it in my preferred video editing software. Add an MP3 (took a few minutes to find one that was both long enough and vaguely relevant to the subject matter), and then encode it using a Divx 5 HD profile and upload it to YouTube...
Simples...
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Fiddling with IJY
There are lots of little tweaks I'd like to do to IJY, however it's rapidly turning out that it would probably involve a fairly hefty re-write, and some things also seem to be set against me.
1) I'd like to change the Picasa and YouTube feeds to just show the picture, and when you hover-over them an info box appears with the text. This would give me back a lot of screen space. the problem is that I went down the "absolute positioning" way of doing things, and this doesn't play nicely with DHTML boxes...
2) I'd like to change the logic of the page over to use jQuery, however it looks like their documentation is out of work at the moment...I haven't been able to access it from any of my machines.
3) Yahoo Pipes do this funky little badge things, that accept an RSS stream and output image slide shows. I'd like to feed in an "all my pictures" feed from Picasa, however it looks like their feed for all photos from a user is broken, with the sort image coming out very strange. For me it starts with my Cornwall pictures taken a few years ago, and then randomly skips around. It's been acknowledged as an issue, but not fix has been developed as yet.
4) Bring the blog more onto the page, which would mean less sizing issues, and no need for such small text. This is mainly dependant on (1) though...
5) Integrate the Twitter feed into the header. I can probably do that without too much hassle
6) RSS caching. For this I need to split out the feed retrieval logic and change it to storage, and then point the current scripts at the stored versions. This would also mean letting rip with cron jobs. Again its all doable, but I need to sort out the layout issues first, before I start playing with that as well...
1) I'd like to change the Picasa and YouTube feeds to just show the picture, and when you hover-over them an info box appears with the text. This would give me back a lot of screen space. the problem is that I went down the "absolute positioning" way of doing things, and this doesn't play nicely with DHTML boxes...
2) I'd like to change the logic of the page over to use jQuery, however it looks like their documentation is out of work at the moment...I haven't been able to access it from any of my machines.
3) Yahoo Pipes do this funky little badge things, that accept an RSS stream and output image slide shows. I'd like to feed in an "all my pictures" feed from Picasa, however it looks like their feed for all photos from a user is broken, with the sort image coming out very strange. For me it starts with my Cornwall pictures taken a few years ago, and then randomly skips around. It's been acknowledged as an issue, but not fix has been developed as yet.
4) Bring the blog more onto the page, which would mean less sizing issues, and no need for such small text. This is mainly dependant on (1) though...
5) Integrate the Twitter feed into the header. I can probably do that without too much hassle
6) RSS caching. For this I need to split out the feed retrieval logic and change it to storage, and then point the current scripts at the stored versions. This would also mean letting rip with cron jobs. Again its all doable, but I need to sort out the layout issues first, before I start playing with that as well...
Labels:
technical
Monday, 2 June 2008
Spam and Chips
About a month ago I swapped over to using GMail as my primary email account. I've been very impressed with it, as I've ad bad experiences with web-based email before. I've always had my email infrastructure set so that swapping should not be the hardest mission in the world...I have a number of "public" email addresses that are typically forwarders to a single inbox, so changing over was mainly a technical matter of repointing the forwarders and letting a couple of people know. I'd had the GMail account set up into Thunderbird et al for a couple of years previously, so that was all ready to go.
One additional thing I did was set GMail up to also pick up the old account. That way I could remove it from my updates, and ensure that any replies I did to those emails came from the new main account. All the PC's I use also now have the Notifier installed, to let me know when messages are received (funny when 2 are sitting next to each other, and both bleep at the same time...)
One issue I've always had previously is spam. I get lots of the stuff, mainly due to the fact that I have catch-all's on my domains. Thunderbirds spam filter really struggled to ID and clean it all up, and I often had to can through and flag the various offers of crap I got. GMail has managed to pick up about 95% of everything coming in, and cheerfully assign it to the bin. Its also let me see for the first time exactly how much spam I get..in the last calendar month I've currently had over 11,000 messages flagged as spam! That's getting close to 400 a day. In comparison I've had about 300 valid messages...
Once I got used to the "conversation" display of emails its very intuitive, and save a lot of searching through inboxes. I've also set up a number of rules to flag different types of emails under different categories (based on certain keywords or senders), and this lets me just change the view to emails regarding a certain subject..again very handy!
One additional thing I did was set GMail up to also pick up the old account. That way I could remove it from my updates, and ensure that any replies I did to those emails came from the new main account. All the PC's I use also now have the Notifier installed, to let me know when messages are received (funny when 2 are sitting next to each other, and both bleep at the same time...)
One issue I've always had previously is spam. I get lots of the stuff, mainly due to the fact that I have catch-all's on my domains. Thunderbirds spam filter really struggled to ID and clean it all up, and I often had to can through and flag the various offers of crap I got. GMail has managed to pick up about 95% of everything coming in, and cheerfully assign it to the bin. Its also let me see for the first time exactly how much spam I get..in the last calendar month I've currently had over 11,000 messages flagged as spam! That's getting close to 400 a day. In comparison I've had about 300 valid messages...
Once I got used to the "conversation" display of emails its very intuitive, and save a lot of searching through inboxes. I've also set up a number of rules to flag different types of emails under different categories (based on certain keywords or senders), and this lets me just change the view to emails regarding a certain subject..again very handy!
Friday, 16 May 2008
Busy Day in the Office?
Had a bit of brainwave last night... A couple of days ago I hacked together a basic graph to post up here showing heart rate zones. I also recently posted up a graph that my Polar gear kicks out showing various statistics. I suddently realised that there was nothing really stopping me from taking the raw Polar data and shoe-horning it into Google Graphs to come up with a dynamic online graph!
I've spent the morning studying the Polar file formats, and hacking out the bits I need, and it now looks like I have a prototype script up and running. At the moment there are a couple of assumptions regarding data ranges, however its not the hardest thing in the world to put in some proper validation. Once thats done I'll have a script that can accept any file from my Heart rate Monitor, and output a nice and pretty graph onto a webpage.
Click here to see the script in action...
I've spent the morning studying the Polar file formats, and hacking out the bits I need, and it now looks like I have a prototype script up and running. At the moment there are a couple of assumptions regarding data ranges, however its not the hardest thing in the world to put in some proper validation. Once thats done I'll have a script that can accept any file from my Heart rate Monitor, and output a nice and pretty graph onto a webpage.
Click here to see the script in action...
Twitter Woes
Been doing a little fiddling to ijy.cc last night, and noticed that twitter.com was down...
I've redone ijy.cc so that rather than having to deal with backend security myself, now I use a number of high profile online services, and instead pull in the content from them into a single "digital footprint". The end result is that my page is currently dependant on;
I then grab the RSS feed for each of these sites, do some fairly simple data manipulation, and throw it into a fairly simple XHTML/CSS template. Its very easy for me to maintain, and also to chuck the stuff out to other places (for example, my Blogger blog also posts to MySite on lack-of...
Twitter being down has the effect of killing ijy.cc, as I haven't bothered with any kind of cacheing, and PHP4 (which 34sp is running on) does not support timeouts on the PHP function running in the background capturing the RSS feeds ( file_get-contents, for those who care... ). So I thought I'd do a bit of checking to see if the Twitter downtime was a common occurance, or just bad luck...
Turns out that they have been struggling for about a year, ever since they "went big" in March '07. So much so that a monitoring site made their downtimes public and gave free access to their downtime reports. I know within my company that our targetted uptime for customer facing systems is in the region of 99.8 % over the space of a year (and if we get anywhere near that everyone starts running round like headless chickens), so 98 % average, and dips as low as 92 % is fairly shocking. Of course, I haven't seen the other feeds go down as yet, however they are all backed up by Googles frankly imposing infrastructure, which suffered a whole 7 minutes of downtime in 2007...
...that said, how can Twitter actually make money to fund their horrendous bandwidth and data centre costs? While their page rank is not massive, behind all that you have loads of user-developed apps throwing data too and from them...it must all add up to one fat pipe somewhere. Becase of the nature of the service (small messages, accessible freely from many 3rd party apps) selling advertising is going to be very hard, unless you plan of irritating your entire userbase by doing mass broadcasting. I really see how they are going to struggle to make money, as quite simply people are not visiting their online real-estate, so they aren't getting the eyeballs. It seems that general internet opinion is that like many other big names out there now (google, facebook, skype etc etc) Twitter can plan a business model once they have the userbase...I suppose we'll have to see, but right now I'm a little skeptical.
Of course, all this doesn't help me much... I like the concept of Twitter, and it fits in with the theory of how I've set ijy.cc up. The box will stay for now, and I'll have to live with Twitter's unreliable uptime, however if it stoops too much worse I may have to look at either a technical solution (cronjob-ing and cacheing the feed, which is what happens on lack-of), or looking for a more reliable alternative to fill my top right-hand corner...
I've redone ijy.cc so that rather than having to deal with backend security myself, now I use a number of high profile online services, and instead pull in the content from them into a single "digital footprint". The end result is that my page is currently dependant on;
I then grab the RSS feed for each of these sites, do some fairly simple data manipulation, and throw it into a fairly simple XHTML/CSS template. Its very easy for me to maintain, and also to chuck the stuff out to other places (for example, my Blogger blog also posts to MySite on lack-of...
Twitter being down has the effect of killing ijy.cc, as I haven't bothered with any kind of cacheing, and PHP4 (which 34sp is running on) does not support timeouts on the PHP function running in the background capturing the RSS feeds ( file_get-contents, for those who care... ). So I thought I'd do a bit of checking to see if the Twitter downtime was a common occurance, or just bad luck...
Turns out that they have been struggling for about a year, ever since they "went big" in March '07. So much so that a monitoring site made their downtimes public and gave free access to their downtime reports. I know within my company that our targetted uptime for customer facing systems is in the region of 99.8 % over the space of a year (and if we get anywhere near that everyone starts running round like headless chickens), so 98 % average, and dips as low as 92 % is fairly shocking. Of course, I haven't seen the other feeds go down as yet, however they are all backed up by Googles frankly imposing infrastructure, which suffered a whole 7 minutes of downtime in 2007...
...that said, how can Twitter actually make money to fund their horrendous bandwidth and data centre costs? While their page rank is not massive, behind all that you have loads of user-developed apps throwing data too and from them...it must all add up to one fat pipe somewhere. Becase of the nature of the service (small messages, accessible freely from many 3rd party apps) selling advertising is going to be very hard, unless you plan of irritating your entire userbase by doing mass broadcasting. I really see how they are going to struggle to make money, as quite simply people are not visiting their online real-estate, so they aren't getting the eyeballs. It seems that general internet opinion is that like many other big names out there now (google, facebook, skype etc etc) Twitter can plan a business model once they have the userbase...I suppose we'll have to see, but right now I'm a little skeptical.
Of course, all this doesn't help me much... I like the concept of Twitter, and it fits in with the theory of how I've set ijy.cc up. The box will stay for now, and I'll have to live with Twitter's unreliable uptime, however if it stoops too much worse I may have to look at either a technical solution (cronjob-ing and cacheing the feed, which is what happens on lack-of), or looking for a more reliable alternative to fill my top right-hand corner...
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